Embodiments of the present invention are related to blogging, and more particularly to a system and method that disseminate data content comprised of multiple different data formats for transmission through different protocols and converts the content into a standardized content for use in a user's blog and that can be searched by third party users.
The emergence of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technologies and weblogs (aka. blogs) has helped transform the Web into a service platform that competes with traditional news media for timely content publication, aggregation, and delivery. RSS is a Web content syndication format and is a dialect of XML. All RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website. Unfortunately, the creation and consumption of such timely blog updates are still done, for the most part, manually on desktop computers today. Moreover, many valuable information sources are not yet available as or integrated with RSS sources or other blogging tools. Furthermore, mobile users want to be able to fully participate in the Web 2.0 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/web_2.0] phenomenon by having the ability to publish and access timely news worthy updates directly from their mobile devices.
Blogging has become a quickly spreading passion among various Internet users. A blog entry is essentially a text entry into a Web page that results in a publication of experiences and opinions. A blog entry can also include images, audio, video, and links to other locations on the Internet. The earliest weblogs were nothing more than updated Web sites with grassroots efforts like Slashdot.org. These early weblogs (blogs) were created and maintained by a small number of people. Readers had to visit the blog sites regularly to get the latest updates. Later, these blog sites began to publish machine readable updates in syndication languages such as in RSS or Atom for easy consumption. Personal blog sites such as Xanga [http://xanga.com] and Blogger [http://blogger.com] allowed Web users to actively write to the Web instead of simply reading from the Web.
The emergence of using RSS technologies along with weblogs for spreading timely and personalized information on the Internet has presented challenges to traditional news and media industries. More and more Internet users are finding that they can acquire informational updates from RSS sources and blog sites faster and easier than before. Rather than remembering to get updates on a daily basis, the bloggers configure their RSS browser to automatically check for specified news updates. Since the updates' format is machine readable, the site can present the results in a summarized format to be shown to the bloggers. This aggregation process (e.g., displaying news headlines with individual items sorted by time) allows one to completely customize a fetched site and have it automatically updated on an ongoing basis. For example and as shown in FIG. 3, an Internet based browser, Flock [http://www.Flock.com], with an embedded RSS reader, allows desktop users to easily aggregate several RSS feeds (such as news sources from CNN, CNet News, NY Times, etc.). An aggregator or news aggregator is a type of computer program (such as application software or a Web application) that collects syndicated Web content, such as RSS formatted information and XML feeds from weblogs. An aggregator is able to subscribe to a feed, check for new content at user-determined intervals, and retrieve the content. It is important to note that presently many RSS feeds are edited by a human prior to being provided as an RSS feed by an RSS provider. RSS is used for syndicated news feeds that may be searchable at Internet sites like Blogdigger.com. RSS is not presently provided for disseminating unedited, searchable information.
In FIG. 3, an example of an RSS data feed based Web page 5 is shown. The source 1 of an RSS feed is provided in the first column. A time (and perhaps date) stamp 2 of the RSS feed is provided in a second column of the display. A subject 3 of the RSS feed and the content 4 of the feed are provided in a text format. The combination of the source 1, time stamp 2, subject 3, and content 4 could be considered a type of blog entry in this particular Web page 5. The contents of the Web page 5 may be constructed from a blog 6 that was generated from an RSS feed or feeds.
As discussed above, the creation and consumption of blogs are mostly performed manually on desktop computers. Moreover, there are information sources that contain timely information about a person's or entity's status or situation, such as one that provides a user's geographic location, a user's appointment/calendar data, or information from various sensor networks (i.e., non-traditional content), but these are neither available or integrated with RSS or other syndicated data sources, nor are they searchable by a third party user. In addition, users are requesting to be able to send, search and receive blog information (perhaps in a condensed form) on their mobile devices or to be able to publish or search audio/video blogs that combine the Web and the richness of a multimedia experience. Furthermore, storage of syndicated data along with non-syndicated multi-media content for usage in a user's blog site while keeping all the information searchable by a third party is not an available feature to date.